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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Bonggang Bonggang Bamboo: the Tinikling Showdown--2 videos

The biggest gathering of Tinikling dancers I've seen, numbering a couple of hundreds, was the spectacular highlight of Pasinaya 2010: CCP Open House Festival two Sundays ago. Kudos to the kids, who were fetching to look at in their colorful native finery, for braving the noonday heat as they performed the dance on the CCP front lawn. Watch--the first video taken minutes before the show proper, and the second the big moment itself. Overall show honcho Chris Millado said the 7,000 entry bands they had prepared were all gone by midday, with more people dropping by in the afternoon. A strong opener to the National Arts Month this February.

The tinikling is an indigenous dance from the Philippines that involves two people beating, tapping, and sliding bamboo poles on the ground and against each other in coordination with one or more dancers who step over and in between the poles in a dance. The name is a reference to birds locally known as tikling, which can be any of a number of Rail species; the term tinikling literally means "tikling-like".[1]

Tinikling involves five steps; during the first four steps, the dancers dance opposite each other, and during the last step, they start from the same side of the poles. The dance originated in Leyte among the Visayan islands in the central Philippines as an imitation of the tikling bird dodging bamboo traps set by rice farmers. The bamboo is also used as a percussive instrument as it is banged against the ground (or a piece of wood to make it easier to hold) and each other in a pattern. The bamboo has to be closed hard enough to make a sound, and the dancers must be quick enough to not get their foot (or feet) caught. As the dance continues, the banging of the bamboo becomes faster and harder, the sound of the clashing bamboo and the quickness of feet demonstrated by the dancers thrilling and awing the crowd.

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